The Elite Nature of Folk Knowledge: Final Paper

Oral, written, and printed knowledge all have an element of divisiveness to them.  You must know someone else’s language in order to communicate effectively with them and those who can’t read or write are unable to use books to gain knowledge.  If you are a professor whose articles have been published, you are held in higher regard than a professor who has not.  Folk knowledge seems like it would represent an easily entered community, one that does not require a skill that is difficult to learn.  However, knowledge that one person possesses and another does not is divisive in nature.  Although folk knowledge can create a small community of people who share a certain type of knowledge or skill, the passing down of specific kinds of folk knowledge deters the existence of a large, open community.  One must have a specific skill to be a part of it.

            Folk knowledge has the potential to bring together people who share a certain type of knowledge.  When someone has the knowledge or experience required, they are welcomed into the group, as Dane shows in his post, “Coming of Age.”  He explains that, “As a boy you …grow up observing grown men and desiring to someday be mature …you learn the differences between being a boy and a man.”  The young men who completed the coming of age ritual in a Brazilian tribe were accepted as members of society when they could were a glove full of biting ants for ten minutes without complaining.  As opposed to written or printed knowledge, which require literacy to use, the hurdles of folk knowledge in becoming a part of a community differ are easier to jump.  For example, my roommate, who is not a member of the Church, has grown to feel more like a part of the Mormon community here when in her “Intro to Mormonism” class, Gospel terms were explained to her.  Another example are the guilds in England, when people who knew how to print or had a specialized skill set were guaranteed access into a community.

Sumerian calendar

            Those requirements, however, also act as the boundaries between one community and another.  They ensure that acceptance is based on what you know, and thus divide people.  As Alicia mentioned in our salon conversation yesterday, the nature of folk knowledge makes a community exclusive because it is difficult for a teacher of a small group to teach their students exactly what people in other groups were learning.  This is because most learning, like my teaching my roommate to juggle, requires a small group of people with an authoritative figure.  There will almost always be a disparity between the same kind of knowledge shared in different communities. In Summer's blog post, “Once Upon a Time,” ancient civilizations used calendars, but in different ways.  If you were a Sumerian in the Tigris-Euphrates River valley, you might believe a calendar with a 20-day month really was the most effective way to keep track of the months, while in Egypt, you would go by the cycles of the moon and the Dog Star.  Though both civilizations charted the passing of time, the way they made sense of time was not the same.     

The folk knowledge that one possesses determines one’s acceptance into society.  This is especially evident in Jared Jones' post on bathtubs.  When people in Queen Elizabeth’s time began to emphasize cleanliness, those who didn’t have the folk knowledge of how to bathe were looked down upon.  “Suddenly, personal cleanliness was a sign of status, a prerequisite to being accepted as normal in society …the rich who bathe and the poor who can’t afford to/wouldn’t know how to operate a bathtub…'”  Although rites of passage may bind together the boys in the Brazilian tribe, they also make it impossible for those who cannot pass the test to enter, to become men.  They must try, over and over, again, or they will always be outsiders.

For this reason, folk knowledge is not indiscriminate; it is not the kind of knowledge that leads to large communities.  It divides people by what they know, even if the type of knowledge is the same.